


Who We Used to Be (Who We Are Still)

by knightswhosay



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-13
Updated: 2015-01-27
Packaged: 2018-03-07 08:52:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3168884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/knightswhosay/pseuds/knightswhosay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One-shots and drabbles about the characters' childhoods. Newest chapter: Aida Riko.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Two -- Midorima Shintarou

Shintarou’s mother goes into labor in the evening and does not give birth until midnight which means that Shintarou doesn’t get to see his new baby sister until she and his mother come back from the hospital next day. His mother is exhausted and goes straight to bed, and Shion, his sister, is asleep as well (though Shintarou discovers this is the exception rather than the rule).Shintarou, six years old, is just tall enough to peek into the crib. Shion, he thinks, is beautiful, sharing his and his mother’s green eyes (although Shion’s are a touch more blue than his). She doesn’t have hair yet, but Shintarou hopes, for her sake, that she has not inherited the Midorima green hair.

The next day, his mother is up and about when he gets back from school. He tells her that he has decided he loves Shion and Midorima, and Midorima Nanae bestows upon him a smile so bright that Shintarou feels like he’s in one of those awful kissy movies. He scrunches up his nose.

 

When Shinatarou is eight, he decidedly does not love his younger sister. Whenever his only friend (a girl named Watanabe Aya who purportedly doesn’t make fun of his hair because one of her cousins is albino so she kinda knows how it feels except not really—but all that matters is that she doesn’t make fun of him and likes books so they usually read together or talk about reading or sometimes go to the movies, although once, after complaining nonstop about her grandfather makes her play it every time she visits, she teaches him how to play shogi) comes over, Shion will toddle up to them and interrupt whatever they’re doing. Then she’ll say Aya’s name (and of course, she learned Aya’s name before Shintarou’s, before even learning nii-chan) and Aya will make all these stupid faces at Shion and giggle, and Shintarou will feel stupidly jealous because he already knows he isn’t Aya’s only friend even though she’s his only friend and he doesn’t want to be replaced by his freaking younger sister.

Then Aya will leave and his mother will chide him for being rude to Shion and he’ll go hide in his room until he tamps down on his stubbornness enough to go apologize to a two-year old and of course, she’ll reply with complete nonsense.

 

When he’s ten, things become worse and better. Aya leaves permanently. Her father gets a promotion and moves the family to Hiroshima. Shintarou starts worrying about grades, almost to the point where it’s an obsession, especially for someone so young. He probably wouldn’t get enough sleep if weren’t equally as stubborn parents.

But Shion is four, and while she doesn’t seem to be nearly as much of a person as he was at four, he can at least communicate to her now, not that communication will ever be his forte. He starts reading her bedtime stories, and one night, his father takes a picture of the two of them curled up together in Shion’s bed after they both fell asleep (his mother has gotten tired of being a stay at home mom and has started teaching cram school since she has the credentials).

(When he is ten, he also picks up a basketball for the first time and has to learn everything for himself because he has always been smart in school and has forgotten how to ask for help.)

 

Shintarou starts middle school, and it is just a relief to be talking to someone other than his family. Even if he cannot call the basketball team his friends, he has figured out how to talk to them, the first people since Aya, unless you count teachers which Shintarou doesn’t.

And they may not be friends yet, but Nijimura seems to understand despite being only one year older, and the other day Akashi asked him if he knew how to play Shogi. He wonders if Akashi is a lot like him—lonely, although in Akashi’s case he has admirers but Shintarou’s read enough to know those aren’t the same as friends—and decides he must be, although learning that he has no siblings and little family involvement does make him doubt it a little bit.

Shion is six this year and Shintarou marvels that he was her age when she was born. He wonders about how similar they are. He knows she is smart, for a six year old at least, and she also already needs glasses, but she is also beautiful, with his mother’s green eyes and dark hair the color of obsidian and skin just a little darker than his. She is also far more popular than he ever was, always. being invited to some little girl or boy’s birthday party, and he wonders why because she’s just as quiet as him, if not quite as shy. (The moment he learns she got sent to the principal’s office for starting a fight with a group of kids who kept bullying her classmates he knows it’s because she’s far more kind and courageous than he is.)

Sometimes both his father has to stay late at work and his mother has to go in early, in which he goes and picks up Shion from school and takes her his basketball practice. She’s always very good, completing her smidgen of homework before watching them, never ever disturbing them. Occasionally, he sees Momoi go up and talk to her, but Teikou’s basketball program is so big the managers are always kept busy.

 

Shintarou is fourteen when things start going to hell, although the chaos lasts several months after his fifteenth birthday. He’s not surprised though. No matter how lucky cancer is, at heart he’ll always be a cynic. He always knew the team’s happiness wouldn’t last—friendships are temporary—and looking back, he thinks he noticed some of the warning signs (looking back, he thinks that’s why Kuroko why so mad at him: that he was the only other person uninvolved enough to see what was going on and to try to stop it, but was too cowardly, too resigned to fate, to do anything).

But Shintarou has never been as impartial as others thought and he pretended. He is very sad and confused. He comes home from practice, locks himself in his room, and cries, and little eight-year old Shion is the only one who knows.

One day is particularly bad. She knocks on the door for minutes until Shintarou finally stops saying “Go away” and says “What do you want?”

“Onii-chan,” she says, which is strange because she almost always calls him Shintarou, “can you teach me how to shoot baskets?”

He unlocks and opens the door. “Why?”

“Basketball used to make you really happy and now it doesn’t. I guess because everyone on your team is a giant meanie? So I thought you might enjoy playing basketball with someone you like.”

Shintarou blushes because of course he does, even though she’s just his little sister (he says just, but the title actually makes her more important, not less).

“Also, I wanna learn because I’ve watched you so much.”

He’s quiet for a moment, then says, “Let me wash my face.”

(Shintarou is not a born teacher but he enjoys teaching her nonetheless, although she is about as good at shooting as Kuroko. He tells her that she would be better if she had her lucky item with her.)

 

Shintarou is sixteen and invites Takao home one afternoon. It’s the first time he’s had a friend at his house since Aya moved away. And of course, Takao gets along wonderfully with Shion, naturally, the way Takao gets along with everyone (Shion doesn’t get along with everyone—she still gets into fights at school, which is considered very inappropriate since she is both ten and a girl—but she has friends). Shintarou is jealous and mature enough to be disgusted with himself.

Takao tells him the next the day he was surprised how similar Shintarou and Shion were, especially as they seemed so different at first (she was a lot friendlier, although not very talkative).

Shintarou shrugs. “She’s better. Kinder, braver.”

Takao looks like he wants to say something but doesn’t. Eventually, he invites Shintarou to see a college basketball game that weekend. After much grumbling about studying and homework, Shintarou accepts.

 

He gets home one evening his senior year to hear crying from a closed bedroom on the way to his room. He freezes. He does not know how to comfort his crying basketball team, much less his younger sister. He walks past her door into his own, putting his stuff down and sitting down at his desk. Less than a minute later, he’s walking back towards Shion’s bedroom.

Shintarou knocks on the door.

“Shintarou?” her voice quakes.

“Yes,” he says. He swallows. “Are you…are you okay?” He thinks it’s a stupid thing to ask, but doesn’t know what else to say.

He hears footsteps on the other side of the door. The handle turns and the door opens. Shion looks up at him with red eyes and a tear-tracked face. At 160 cm, she’s one of the five tallest girls in her grade and the doctor says she might even have a few more inches, and yet she’s over 30 cm shorter than him.

“Boys are stupid,” she says.

“Yes,” he agrees.

“That’s not what you’re supposed to say. You’re supposed to say ‘Girls are stupid too.’”

“I am?” Shintarou had limited experience with girls, but the few girls he did know were vastly more intelligent than so many of the boys he knew.

“That’s how it’s supposed to work.”

“I don’t—”

“Isn’t it?” She bursts into fresh tears and hugs him. He pats her back. “Well,” she sniffs, “I think both boys and girls are stupid.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, mournfully.

“I bet you never had problems like mine. You always had basketball. You didn’t have to deal with boys and girls. I wish I had basketball.”

Shintarou does not tell her that he didn’t always have basketball, not really, because there’s no need to make this about him, because he’s been stupid by being jealous of her all this time (and he hates being stupid, although he hates the thought he that hasn’t been the best older brother he could have been). “You’ll find something, or someone,” he says, hoping it’s true, and picks her up, which is easy because she’s still so much smaller than him, and puts her down on her bed.

“Can you read a book to me, onii-chan?”

“Okay,” he says, “Which one?”

She points to a book on a nearby bookshelf. He goes and gets it, along with the chair from her desk. He starts reading and Shion cuddles into her bed.

When their mother gets home from work, she finds them like that, although both of them are now asleep and the book has fallen out of Shintarou’s grasp and onto the floor.  


	2. Demoralized -- Aida Riko

Aida Riko, age eight, spent her days roaming her neighborhood hoping to find a group of kids playing basketball. Or at least, that how she spent the days she managed to escape the house without parental accompaniment. It was a difficult task, but she was getting better at it, and these escapes had started occurring with, from her parents’ point of view, a worrying amount of frequency.

Today it was hot and Riko was dressed in a skirt, with shorts underneath, and a t-shirt with her favorite animal on it, a present from her birthday. Today was also her lucky day, because, as she turned a street corner, she came across a street court, and playing on it was a group of boys that couldn’t have been more than a year older than her.

She marched around the fence, then stood, feet shoulder-width apart, watching the game. She quickly realized that the boys were not nearly as good as the players at her father’s gym, rarely making the basket and having little concept of what passing (and fouls) were.

When the ball bounced out-of-bounds near her, she picked it up. “Hey!” she said, smiling brightly. “Can I play?”

Most of the boys looks unsure, looking around at each other hoping someone else would answer this stranger. A few of them shrugged. One boy stepped forward. “No.”

Her smile dropped. “Why not?”

“You’re a girl.”

“And?”

“Girls aren’t good at sports.” He rolled his eyes like this was common sense.

Riko’s eyes narrowed and she put her spare hand on her hip. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. Because girls are weak.”

A few of the boys had started looking confused or mildly uncomfortable, but none of them said anything.

“Says who?”

“Me. Cause I beat both of my sisters at arm wrestling and at running.”

“That’s stupid. You’re not even taller than me.”

“Yes I am! And you still can’t play! Give us our ball back.”

“No,” said Riko, “go get it yourself,” and threw the basketball over the chain fence, which was taller than the goal. Some of the boys stared and even the lead boy had to force himself to stop looking at it. “Good luck being a good basketball player with those stubby arms of yours.” Riko turned on her heel and walked home.

After that, her escape attempts stopped. Her parents were relieved. Riko started going to to her father’s gym everyday, but she gradually stopped participating, choosing to only watch.  

**Author's Note:**

> I hope to do several of these. If there's a certain character you'd like to see let me know at my tumblr (butnolivingmanami.tumblr.com) and I'll consider them.


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